Recent growth in demand for broadband wireless services enables rapid deployment of innovative, cost-effective, and interoperable multi-vendor broadband wireless access products, providing alternatives to wireline broadband access for applications such as telephony, personal communications systems (PCS) and high definition television (HDTV). At the same time, broadband wireless access has been extended from fixed to mobile subscriber stations, for example at vehicular speed. Though the demand for these services is growing, the channel bandwidth over which the data may be delivered is limited. Therefore, it is desirable to deliver data at high speeds over this limited bandwidth in an efficient, as well as cost effective, manner.
In the ever-continuing effort to increase data rates and capacity of wireless networks, communication technologies evolve. An encouraging solution for the next generation broadband wireless access delivering high speed data over a channel is by using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). The high-speed data signals are divided into tens or hundreds of lower speed signals that are transmitted in parallel over respective frequencies within a radio frequency (RF) signal that are known as subcarrier frequencies (“subcarriers”). The frequency spectra of the subcarriers may overlap so that the spacing between them is minimized. The subcarriers are also orthogonal to each other so that they are statistically independent and do not create crosstalk or otherwise interfere with each other. When all of the allocated spectrum can be used by all base stations, the channel bandwidth is used much more efficiently than in conventional single carrier transmission schemes such as AM/FM (amplitude or frequency modulation), in which only one signal at a time is sent using only one radio frequency, or frequency division multiplexing (FDM), in which portions of the channel bandwidth are not used so that the subcarrier frequencies are separated and isolated to avoid inter-carrier interference (ICI).
In OFDM, each block of data is converted into parallel form and mapped into each subcarrier as frequency domain symbols. To get time domain signals for transmission, an inverse discrete Fourier transform or its fast version, IFFT, is applied to the symbols. The symbol duration is much longer than the length of the channel impulse response so that inter-symbol interference is avoided by inserting a cyclic prefix for each OFDM symbol. Thus, OFDM is much less susceptible to data loss caused by multipath fading than other known techniques for data transmission. Also, the coding of data onto the OFDM subcarriers takes advantage of frequency diversity to mitigate loss from frequency-selective fading when forward error correction (FEC) is applied.
Another approach to providing more efficient use of the channel bandwidth is to transmit the data using a base station having multiple antennas and then receive the transmitted data using a remote station having multiple receiving antennas, referred to as Multiple Input-Multiple Output (MIMO). The data may be transmitted such there is spatial diversity between the signals transmitted by the respective antennas, thereby increasing the data capacity by increasing the number of antennas. Alternatively, the data is transmitted such that there is temporal diversity between the signals transmitted by the respective antennas, thereby reducing signal fading.
In orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA) systems, multiple users are allowed to transmit simultaneously on the different subcarriers per OFDM symbol. In an OFDMA/TDMA embodiment, for example, the OFDM symbols are allocated by time division multiplexing access (TDMA) method in the time domain, and the subcarriers within an OFDM symbols are divided in frequency domain into subsets of subcarriers, each subset is termed a subchannel.
In OFDMA system, a preamble may be used to provide: base station identification and selection, CIR measurement, framing and timing synchronization, frequency synchronization as well as channel estimation.
Currently preamble is specified only for single antenna transmission, and does not provide a way to efficiently estimate channels from multiple base station antennas in MIMO environment. The ability to measure the channel quality in the entire bandwidth is beneficial, if each subscriber station scans the entire frequency bandwidth and selects the best band to be used in the subsequent frames. Since the channels seen from different transmit antennas are more or less uncorrelated, choosing the best band based only on a channel from a single transmit antenna is far from being optimal.
In addition, the current preamble per IEEE 802.16-2004 is designed primarily for fixed deployment. The preamble search requires a large amount of computation power at the subscriber station for system access and for cell selection and reselection to support the device mobility in a multi-cell deployment scenarios and to perform frequency domain fine synchronization. For the initial cell search, there is no prior knowledge about the synchronization positions for potential base station candidates; hence the subscriber station needs to perform the correlations with all possible pseudo noise (PN) sequences for each Fourier fast transform (FFT) window position within the entire searching window. Such a window could be large even for the synchronous base station network. For handoff, even with the presence of the adjacent base station list information broadcast from the anchoring base station, the preamble search is of excessively high computational complexity.
It is therefore desirable to provide preambles enabling easy, fast synchronization between the subscriber station and the base stations, supporting channel estimation in MIMO environment; being compatible with non-MIMO subscriber stations; and providing low complexity and fast cell search by fine tuning after coarse synchronization.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved preamble design, method and apparatus which are suitable for the mobile, broadband wireless access systems. It is further desirable to provide an improved preamble design, method and apparatus to a MIMO OFDMA system.